Dead Days of Summer Read online

  “There may be a bunch of extraneous prints. We had the van there.” Lou was remembering the morning after Max was arrested. “We got his prints and found that bloody shirt. We had a couple of cars there. I don’t know if there’ll be anything to find.”

  “Try.”

  “Sure. But don’t get your hopes up, Billy.”

  Billy drove the precise speed limit, as he always did. It would take him three hours to get home. If Lou found matching tire treads at the second cabin, somebody had a hell of an explanation to make. But who? That was the problem. Say the prints matched the Dodds’ silver Lexus. Even if they tied the car to the proximity of murder and to the cabin where Max claimed he was dumped unconscious, they still didn’t know who drove it.

  Annie rested her elbows on the warm wood of the pier. Often when she and Max came to work, they stopped for a moment to look out over the marina, checking to see what new boats had arrived, noting empty slips for the charter boats. The marina had its August bustle. A huge yacht was moving slowly through the harbor entrance. Weekend sailors who had arrived early were scrubbing down decks, loading provisions, bringing aboard fishing gear. One of her favorites—J. P. Vanilla—was maneuvering toward the Sound.

  Fury suffused Annie. It was high summer and she and Max should be leaning against the railings, laughing, loving, free.

  Footsteps sounded on the boardwalk behind her. Annie didn’t look around. A shadow fell across the railing. She felt something brush against her, a weight tugging at her right pocket.

  Barb sauntered a few feet to a coin telescope that offered a view of the Sound and a nearby island and close-ups of hummocks in the marsh and sometimes intriguing views of activities on passing boats. She dropped in a coin, bent to look. An almost imperceptible gesture of her left hand beckoned Annie.

  Annie scooted until she was only a foot from the telescope. She leaned over the railing as if looking into the luxurious salon of an enormous yacht.

  Barb’s whisper was just loud enough for Annie to hear. “Thought you’d want to know. Max is raising hell. Wants to know where you are, what you’re doing. Wants you to stop it, whatever it is. Says leave everything up to Handler Jones.”

  Annie didn’t turn her head. “Tell him I’m fine and picking up stuff Jones can’t find.” But not enough and nothing was working out the way she’d thought it would and the Dodds were leaving in the morning and she hadn’t found anything that might help free Max. Oh, Max, I’m trying, I’m doing my best, I love you. “Tell him not to worry.” Annie patted the sagging pocket, felt the outline of the tape recorder. “Thanks, Barb.”

  “Sure. If you need help, call.” Barb pushed the telescope out of the way and moved briskly up the boardwalk.

  Annie watched Barb’s receding figure. She suddenly felt terribly alone even though vacationers milled back and forth on the boardwalk and weekend sailors moved purposefully on their boats. Annie glanced at her watch. Almost ten. She moved impatiently forward.

  Cats by Curtis was housed in a gray wood shack along the far shore. Three big cats were moored to a nearby pier. The massive wooden doors were closed, but a light shone in a ticket window on the left front.

  Annie walked to the window. A sweet-faced teenage girl smiled. “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Kyle.” She tried to keep disappointment from her voice. “I thought he would be here when you open.”

  The girl turned, called out. “Hey, Kyle, somebody to see you.”

  There was an answering shout.

  The girl leaned forward. “He’s working out behind the building. There’s a path to your left.”

  “Thanks.” Annie turned, moved quickly. As she did, she saw a man fishing on the pier swing around to watch. Despite the floppy bush hat and dark glasses, she recognized Duane Webb. He bent down to his bucket, pulled out a live eel, set to work with his hook. Annie knew he’d been recruited by Barb to watch over her this morning. Annie gave the tiniest of nods, curved around the side of the building. It was lovely to know help was at hand should she need it. She reached into her right pocket, turned on the tape recorder.

  She followed the curve of the bank as she walked down the side of the building. Water lapped against another pier. Boats were pulled out of the water and in various stages of maintenance and repair. Kyle Curtis was kneeling by a beached cat. One hand moved rhythmically as he sanded the near hull. Muscles rippled in his tanned back. He wore ragged cutoffs and boat shoes without socks.

  When she stopped beside him, he looked up. Dark glasses masked his eyes. He was still for a moment, then came easily to his feet. His dark hair was tousled, his cheeks unshaven. He stood in an easy slouch. He didn’t say a word.

  Any woman would be aware of his magnetism, his darkly handsome face and full, sensuous lips, the mat of hair on his chest and the rivulets of sweat coursing down his body, the way his shorts hung from his hips, sagging at his midriff. Surely Vanessa had been no exception.

  Annie dropped her hand, tugged the pocket to keep it open. “Your conversation with Vanessa Monday afternoon was overheard.”

  His scowl was quick and ferocious. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “She said she was mad about you—”

  “Shit.” He crumpled the square of sandpaper in his hand, took a step toward her.

  Annie stayed where she was. He was so close now she could see the flecks from his sanding on his chest and arms. “Vanessa said you could relax, that everything would be out in the open. Was she going to tell Heather?”

  “There wasn’t a bloody thing to tell Heather. I don’t know what the hell Vanessa meant. Look”—his truculent face was inches from hers—“I’m tired of all the crap. I wasn’t interested in Vanessa. I didn’t give a damn about Vanessa. For some crazy reason, Vanessa started after me a couple of months ago. But it was always when Heather was around or her mother or Jon. And yeah, I got sucked into it a little bit. She was a babe. I’ve always enjoyed babes. I should have told her to cool it, but I kind of got a kick out of it. Especially since Sam was following her around like a lapdog and I like bugging him. He’s got that West Point hard-ass attitude. He doesn’t like me any more than Jon does. Nobody there likes me. Except Heather. She did until she decided I was running around on her. Hell, I told her there was nothing to it. And that damn Vanessa wouldn’t ease up. I figured out she was phony and I told her to lay off. That’s why I called her Monday. Heather had told me the wedding was off. Because of Vanessa. I told her she was crazy as a loon and we had a big fight. I called Vanessa and told her I’d had enough, that she had to leave me alone. That’s when she said that she was mad about me. She was being a bitch. Anyway, I told her I was going to tell everybody how she’d hounded me. Then she said that bit about everything being out in the open. Like I said, I don’t know what she meant but I can tell you it didn’t have a damn thing to do with me.”

  Annie stared at him. What he said didn’t make a lot of sense. Why would Vanessa make a play—and a phony one at that—for Heather’s fiancé? “Where were you Monday evening?” Would Vanessa’s old friend have asked this question? Annie didn’t know or care.

  He poked his sunglasses higher on his nose. “Out on a cat. By myself.”

  It could be true. Or false. There was no way to prove his whereabouts. He could have sailed the cat around the island, tied up to the pier, walked to the Whitman garage, taken the silver car.

  His mouth folded in an unhappy glower. “Heather didn’t believe me. That’s a hell of a deal. She ought to know when I’m telling her the truth.” His tone was plaintive, like a small boy’s anger at injustice. He turned away, walked back to the beached cat, dropped down beside it. But he didn’t resume his sanding. He simply sat there in the hot sun, face slack, shoulders slumped.

  Lou parked the crime van on River Otter Road. There was no shoulder, simply a steep slant into the ditch. Any car traveling west would be required to swing into the opposite lane, but there was no traffic on the dead-end road.
Lou wasn’t concerned about road hazards. He’d chosen to walk the fifty or so yards into the woods to the cabin where Max had stayed on Monday night to avoid destroying existing tread prints. A camera dangled from a strap around his left wrist. The drill was the same as earlier. Find a tread print, photograph it, measure it, sketch a drawing for context, shellac the find, mix the plaster of paris, pour.

  If he found a print.

  He walked on the ridge between rutted tracks. The overhead canopy of trees blocked the sunlight, making it dim and shadowy along the track. Insects swarmed, no-see-ums, mosquitoes, horseflies, chinch bugs. Lou flailed at the bloodsucking whirlwind, all the while scanning the ruts for a half-inch-long tomahawk-shaped impression.

  The right rear wheel of the silver car had been repaired. Probably a screw or nail on the road had been picked up, caused a flat or a slow leak, and the patch resulted in that distinctive marker.

  Lou kept a steady pace as he made his careful scrutiny. By the time he reached the clearing, saw the ramshackle wooden cabin on stilts, he was covered with welts, perspiring heavily in the humid air, parched for water, and sure of the futility of his quest. He gazed about the sun-blistered patch of dusty ground that fronted the cabin, wished he had a hat. He flapped a hand at a lumbering horsefly. The likelihood of finding what he sought—even if it was there—ranked right up there with the possibility of winning the lottery.

  He managed a wry grin. His mother bought a lottery ticket every week. Twice she’d won fifty dollars. She always pointed out that you couldn’t win if you didn’t have a ticket. He couldn’t find a tread if he didn’t look. By now the jerk of his arm to ward away biting insects was automatic. As his eyes studied the uneven ground, he tried to picture the movements of the silver car on Monday night. He didn’t care about the driver. He was imagining the car. Right next to the steps was the obvious place to stop, especially if a comatose Max was sprawled in the back seat. Okay. The car stops, probably with the back door nearest to the steps. Lou wondered how hard it had been to pull an unconscious Max up the stairs. Maybe the guy used a fireman’s lift. Whatever, Lou thought it had to have been a struggle. Max was a solid six feet two, 180 pounds. But somebody got Max into the cabin if he didn’t arrive under his own steam. The circuit solicitor would have to listen up if they found treads from the silver car here. That would be too many sightings of the silver car to ignore.

  Lou ducked away from a bumblebee, slowly walked toward the steps. When he stood to one side, studying the ground, he saw a crisscross of tracks. Foot by foot, he looked. Tracks, sure. Plenty of them.

  The crime van had been here and cruisers and media. No trace of that distinctive marker.

  A wasp buzzed near his face. Sweat burned his eyes, slid down his face and back and legs. Lou’s face folded in a scowl. Maybe it was only because he’d thought it through that way, but he could see that damn car parked here, knew in his gut it had been here. He hated to be so close and lose out. Okay. The car was parked here but it had to get back to River Otter Road.

  Lou squinted against the sun. Okay, the car could have curved in a tight arc. Or the driver could have backed around the side of the cabin, then turned. Lou turned on his heel, bent to stare at the ground, looking, looking. Nope. No car had backed this way recently enough to leave a trail.

  Lou moved forward. It would require a tight turn for a big car to make the arc in one try. Maybe if the car backed up here…Lou shaded his eyes against the late-morning blaze, felt the squelch of his shirt on his back. God, he was thirsty. He pushed back a straggly clump of a puckerbush and looked down. He wiped the sweat from his eyes, thinking he’d imagined what he wanted to see. He felt a surge of adrenaline, the hunter sighting a buck. There it was. By God, there it was, clear and distinct and unmistakable, the inch-long tomahawk-shaped impression.

  Annie plopped the last of the unfolded cardboard boxes in the middle of Vanessa’s living room. She hurried outside into the ever-enervating heat, retrieved the small sack with four rolls of easy-tear plastic tape and a package of bubble wrap. She carried the materials with her, dropped them on the coffee table, glanced away from the book Vanessa had left there. A novel by Anne Rivers Siddons. Annie knew she should get right to work, boxing up Vanessa’s belongings. That was the ostensible reason for her stay here. Moreover, the sorting out would be Annie’s last chance to search for Vanessa’s diary. It was beginning to look as though finding that diary might be the only way to learn the truth behind her murder. It had seemed clear-cut last night that Vanessa had engaged in a torrid romance with Kyle Curtis. Annie had felt so confident, she’d arranged to have a tape recorder in her pocket when she talked to him. Yes, she had that angry exchange taped and what did it prove? If he was telling the truth, he’d dallied with Vanessa but never been seriously involved despite the surface appearance of her attraction to him.

  Annie paced back and forth in the small living room. Of course, if Kyle had murdered Vanessa, he certainly would have lied this morning. Yet Annie couldn’t forget the plaintive sound of his voice when he’d mourned Heather’s disbelief. Somehow she didn’t believe Kyle was a false lover. Or a murderer.

  If Kyle was dismissed as a suspect, that left Sam Golden. This morning she’d felt a swift rush of fear when he’d approached her soft-footed from the shadow of the pines. He’d waited for her, she was sure of it. But when he reached her, there was no threat and she felt no sense of anxiety. He’d brought that folder of pictures. It could have simply been an excuse to see what she was doing as well as a way of distancing himself from Vanessa. Yet he had seemed utterly genuine.

  Not Kyle. Not Sam.

  Annie felt breathless. Last night Jon Dodd had come down to the cottage. By the time he left, her suspicions of Kyle had hardened into certainty. He’d seemed reluctant to share the misgivings Lillian felt about her prospective son-in-law, worried about the effect of an investigation on Heather, and, of course, for those reasons eager to know if the police had shared more information about their investigation to Vanessa’s sister.

  Jon Dodd?

  Annie felt an instinctive flicker of disbelief. Every hint of connection between Vanessa and a man came down to Kyle or Sam. Heather’s anger at Kyle was a flag. Martha’s burning hostility to Vanessa was a flag. There was no link to Jon. Nothing.

  Annie felt a ripple of coldness deep inside. No link to Jon…Was this the careful, clever, cold design that made certain there was no link between Vanessa and her killer? Max had been duped, decoyed, set up to protect her killer. Had the linkage between Vanessa and Sam and Kyle been as cleverly constructed?

  If Jon Dodd was the shadowy figure behind Vanessa, surely somewhere there was a trace of their affair. But time was running out. Annie looked frantically around the living room. There were still so many places to look, seeking the diary. Yet the diary might not exist. Vanessa may have left behind the habit of recording her life just as she’d left behind her station as a waitress and before that her growing-up years in modest circumstances. The diary could be the answer Annie sought, yet now wasn’t the moment to continue the search. By this time tomorrow morning, the Dodd family would be on its way to Cape Cod, the silver car humming north on I-95. Only a few hours remained to find out the truth about Vanessa and the Dodd family.

  Annie whirled, hurried to the door. She clattered down the wooden steps, heading for the Whitman house.

  9

  Annie’s swift pace slowed. The nearer she came to the house, the less confident she felt. Was she desperately trying to fit Jon Dodd into a murderer’s mold because she couldn’t imagine violence behind Sam Golden’s genial manner or Kyle Curtis’s surly, self-absorbed anguish? Was she grasping at straws that would crumple in her grip? Or was she scraping away the camouflage created by a clever killer?

  Despite her instinctive liking for Kyle, he was most publicly linked to Vanessa. His protestations that he was the innocent victim of Vanessa’s pursuit could be a guilty man’s attempt to disarm suspicion. If he hadn’t responde
d to Vanessa, why was Heather furious? The broken engagement seemed clear evidence of a romance between Vanessa and Kyle. Why hadn’t Heather believed his denials? Because she knew he was lying?

  Annie walked slowly up the steps. Heather was hostile to Georgia Lance. Annie was afraid it wouldn’t do any good to talk to her, but she had to try. Tomorrow Heather would be gone.

  There was one last possible avenue to follow. Maybelle claimed Vanessa died because she’d been struck down by the Evil Eye. Did Maybelle have knowledge or was she simply dramatizing her nearness to murder?

  Annie stepped into the cross hall. She heard the distant hum of a vacuum cleaner. Nearer, a faint clatter sounded behind the swing door to the kitchen. She moved past the kitchen. Talking to Maybelle was a priority but she needed to approach the maid alone. Annie reached the main hallway. The hum of the vacuum was louder. Annie gauged the sound to be coming from upstairs. Likely either Maybelle or Cora was vacuuming in the hallway near the stairs. Annie started up the steps, the thick runner underfoot silencing her steps.

  The voice behind her was sharp. “Excuse me.” The verb was drawled. “Can I help you?” The demand was sardonic, the intent insulting.

  Annie forced herself to turn casually, as if relaxed and unembarrassed. She managed a bright smile. “Hello, Heather. I’m looking for Maybelle.”

  “Oh.” Heather’s stare was suspicious. “All right. I’ll tell her to come down.”

  Annie still stood in the center of the stairway. “Actually, I wanted to ask her where you were.” Let Heather work that out in her mind. Perhaps Annie had inquired in the kitchen and been directed in her search by Esther. “Ginger’s asked me to find out more about Vanessa’s friends.”

  Heather’s dark hair was swept up in a ponytail. Her blue-and-white-striped T-shirt hung outside boxy navy shorts. Pink-tipped toes peeked from blue woven crisscross slides. She carried a book tucked under one arm. She would have been the picture of summer ease except for the misery in her eyes and the forlorn droop to her mouth. “She wasn’t my friend and I don’t have a damn thing to say about Vanessa. Now or ever. So, if you’ll excuse me.” She started up the stairs, ready to brush past Annie.